Logicalis

Leading Insurer Canada Life Opts for IP Telephony Solution

The Client

Canada Life, based in Potters Bar Hertfordshire, is the UK arm of Canada Life Financial Corporation, one of Canada's leading insurance companies and a global player with operations in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Germany, and other locations around the world.

Canada Life has nearly a 100 years of experience in providing quality financial advice in the UK and has a range of innovative offerings for life insurance, savings, investment, retirement income and inheritance tax planning. The company has a wide range of services to suit both its direct customers and Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) at an individual and group level.

On 10th July 2003 Canada Life Financial Corporation was acquired by Great-West Lifeco Inc. in a transaction that brought together three of Canada's leading life insurers – Great-West, London Life and Canada Life – to create an even stronger financial services organisation with global reach. This combination of three powerful insurance companies will allow Great-West to grow premium income in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Isle of Man and Germany, where Canada Life has a strong market presence in insurance related businesses. Accordingly, Great-West is continuing to develop and build on the Canada Life brand and to expand its operations in the UK.

The Challenge

As part of the ongoing expansion of its business operations Canada Life recently acquired the UK long-term Group risk insurance business of Royal & Sun Alliance Group. The acquired business was managed by a team of around 250 staff based out of a Royal & Sun Alliance building in Bristol. In executing this transaction Canada Life was careful to ensure that the core of this team remained intact and, in order to minimise any relocation issues, the company decided to move the staff to new premises nearby.

Prior to occupation, the new building needed a complete fit-out of voice and data services. This provided Canada Life with a greenfield opportunity to fully evaluate its business requirements and to plan for both its immediate and future needs. In particular, given that there were no plans to locate IT staff at Bristol, Canada Life was looking for a robust, resilient communications infrastructure that could be managed from its Potters Bar HQ. It also made sense to implement similar network architectures at both the Bristol and Potters Bar sites, so Canada Life decided to opt for a resilient switched infrastructure based on equipment from Cisco Systems.

The next consideration was to determine the best solution for the telephony requirements of the Bristol office. Canada Life was keen to investigate the possibilities of an IP Telephony solution, and to take advantage of the lower infrastructure and on-going management costs of a single converged network infrastructure. The ability to rollout new IP-based applications and the productivity gains that could be achieved from the deployment of future IP-based applications in the future was also attractive.

Canada Life costed out both traditional PBX and IP Telephony solutions. Having taken all factors into consideration (including the overall reduction in the total cost of ownership of a fully converged network) the company decided that IP Telephony was the most cost-effective and future-proof solution. Logicalis, in its capacity as trusted network solutions provider to Canada Life in the UK, provided a successful proposal for the provision of a converged Voice and Data LAN solution for the new Bristol premises.

The Solution

Logicalis designed a highly resilient, low-risk communications infrastructure based on Cisco's AVVID architecture, which has the capacity to deliver voice, video and data services over a single converged infrastructure.

The solution is based on a proven two-tier network architecture that minimises the failure domain to a maximum of 24 user ports. At the Core is a resilient pair of Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches, providing a high availability scalable platform for network services at the Core including Layer 3 routing for WAN links to Potters Bar, and Gigabit Layer 3 connectivity to the Access Layer at the edge of the network. Here services are delivered to the users via Cisco Catalyst 3550 access switches, which provide 10/100 Mbps to the desktop and in-line power (power over Ethernet) for the IP Telephony handsets. To ensure that the Access Layer provides maximum resilience, throughput and QoS capabilities, the Access switches are deployed in pairs, with each pair dual homed to the Core switches. No servers or hosts are located at the Bristol building – instead these are all located centrally at Potters Bar, using Citrix as a transport mechanism to support all data services for the Bristol office.

This centralised approach is also true for the telephony service. Cisco CallManagers have been deployed in a resilient pair configuration, located in Potters Bar. The CallManager provides support for call routing to the PSTN via either BT or Energis bearer services, analogue devices, and integrated Voicemail through Cisco's Unity product, the server for which is also located at Potters Bar. Further functionality can be added incrementally as new applications are introduced in the future.

The Bristol office is equipped with 250 Cisco IP Telephony handsets, together with its own local gateways to access local bearer services and to support any analogue devices, but effectively all management of the infrastructure is done remotely from Potters Bar. A voice gateway at Potters Bar provides an interface between the IP Telephony environment to the existing Canada Life PBX-based telephone system.

The Benefits

The new network infrastructure provides Canada Life with a high capacity solution that will support its business for the foreseeable future. By virtue of the highly scalable nature of the platforms included, it offers maximum investment protection since further capacity can easily be added as required.

Through implementing an IP Telephony solution, Canada Life has already experienced many of the benefits of replacing separate voice and data networks with a single converged network infrastructure. Not only are there significant cost savings in maintaining and operating a single infrastructure, but the cost of making routine moves, adds and changes is far lower in addition to the overall cost of management and support. Centralised management from Potters Bar also means a significant reduction in overall IT costs as no IT support staff have had to be relocated to the Bristol site.

Providing centralised management requires a resilient IP Telephony solution which is capable of operating independently in the event of failure. With the provision of Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST), Logicalis were able to deliver an IP solution which enables the Bristol office to operate almost transparently in the event of a WAN failure. Furthermore, there are many productivity benefits that result from the greater flexibility and functionality of IP Telephony. For example, staff can now log onto any phone, regardless of their location, and have full access to their email and voicemail messages over a single interface.